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THE POLISH CONNECTION

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DURING the summer of 1943, my wife and I were living, or rather hiding, in Jozefow, a small town near Warsaw. It was not the best of places. The Warsaw Ghetto had already been liquidated, and every few days SS units would appear, hunting for Jews to load on trucks or shoot on the spot. Needless to say, we were quite alarmed when one evening an unexpected knock was heard on the door. The unscheduled visitor turned out to be Zdzislaw Jezioranski, a young economist and one of my closest friends. We had graduated from the same Gymnasium in Warsaw in 1932 but had lost contact with each other before the war. I was a Jew, and he had come to see if he could help me. There was no time for a long conversation, our guest had to hurry into Warsaw before the curfew. We exchanged news about friends: the dead and the living. About himself, he said only that he belonged to the Underground, that we would not soon meet again and that his name was now Jan Nowak. Our meeting took place between his first and second mission as courier to Sweden for the underground Home Army. But, about this, Jezioranski-Nowak revealed nothing at the time.

He had made the first journey from Gdansk to Stockholm stowing away in a coal bin on a Swedish freighter. His return was also by ship, and again in coal. Meanwhile two other members of his cell, responsible for the establishment of courier routes, were arrested. The Gestapo was awaiting the courier's return in Gdansk; they had acquired his photograph. Coded radiograms had been sent from the Underground's Warsaw headquarters to Stockholm to delay his departure at any cost. They arrived too late. The ship had already left with its cargo of coal and the courier. On the way it was diverted and docked in Stettin instead of Gdansk. Chance had saved Nowak's life.

In his foreword to Nowak's memoirs Zbigniew Brzezinski writes that they are ''a gripping account of personal heroism.'' I did not come upon the word ''heroism'' in the memoirs themselves. Perhaps that word does not figure in Nowak's vocabulary. For him courage is simply something natural. But this is not military courage. Or, at least, not only military courage. There is in ''Courier From Warsaw'' a striking contrast between Nowak's experiences, extraordinary even by Polish standards, and his dry, objective, almost clinical account. Indeed, it may be that those experiences that are the most crucial, or at any rate the most valuable, can be described only in this matter-of-fact way:

''From the railwaymen I quickly learned many useful things that made my increasingly frequent expeditions to the Reich safer. I became acquainted not only with signaling and the technical terms and duties of railwaymen but also with the construction of passenger coaches. During my expeditions to the west I always carried a railway staff key for opening doors and secret compartments. I never dreamed that there were so many of these in each passenger coach. Not all of them were safe, I was warned. For instance, placing pamphlets in a cache at the bottom of a door was risky because then one could not lower the window completely. I had also been taught that when it is necessary to escape in a hurry while in motion, one can momentarily slow down the train without touching the emergency brake. A steampipe runs under all the carriages, and one only has to turn off the stopcock, found between each pair of carriages, in order to apply the brakes; then, just before one jumps, one moves the stopcock handle back to its former position. It was really quite simple.''

It is really quite simple. But only if you have tried it yourself at least once. Fast-paced action, unpredictable and sudden reversals, accuracy of technical detail, flawless description of places and interiors make ''Courier From Warsaw'' as fascinating and thrilling to read as the best of John Le Carre's novels. The emissary, the courier, the secret agent is entirely on his own in his mission. He crosses and recrosses borders, eludes the police at heavily guarded train stations and ports. At the critical moment he must decide alone. The courier from Warsaw left and returned to his country during the German occupation. Besides risk and adventure, Poland under occupation is the other great theme of Nowak's war memoirs:

''The invaders proved to be rotten psychologists. Because of the constant escalation of repression, terror lost its power to terrorize. People simply stopped being afraid because they had nothing much to lose.

The mass extermination of the Jews and the liquidation of the ghettos seemed to be the turning point. The rest of the population began to realize that their turn would come next.''

In Warsaw a wall separated the ghetto from the rest of the city. Like the Berlin wall today, it was the border between two worlds. On this border stood the district court. The entrance was on the ''Aryan'' side, the windows faced the Jewish quarter. Early in 1943, Nowak was summoned to the court as a witness:

''After the first deportation, the ghetto population was reduced to about 70,000. On that particular day the deportations to the death camp at Treblinka were being resumed after a long interval. From the third-floor courtroom we could hear frightful shrieks from the street below - the voices of men, women, and children mingled in an outcry of bitter lamentation. ...

''I pushed forward to the window and saw a crowd of Jews being herded along the middle of the street, probably toward the branch railroad line at Stawki. They were half-running, jostling one another, harried from both sides by SS men with long whips. ... Suddenly a well-dressed woman with a baby in her arms detached herself from the throng and tried to reach a Gestapo man on the sidewalk, making signs to him and waving a roll of banknotes - a last, desperate attempt to save herself and the child. I heard the swish of the whip; the woman staggered and dropped the child, who rolled along the pavement. At that moment an old Jewish woman raised her hands and eyes to heaven and screamed at the top of her voice like one possessed: 'Hitler, may grass grow on the walls of your house!' ''

Here genocide is seen through a courtroom window while the court considers, with inviolable gravity, whether or not a sack of wheat or flour had been stolen from a public road. The scene is reminiscent of a dream Raskolnikov has in ''Crime and Punishment'' in which he is a small boy who cannot prevent drunken men from whipping an old mare to death. But in Nowak it is people who are being exterminated. Nowak is a surprisingly good writer. But he does not write literature. Literature, at least for those of us who survived the war in Poland, is American novels about the Nazi occupation and extermination camps, Styron's ''Sophie's Choice'' not excepted. The courtroom episode is simply one among many in which Nowak records the life endured, day by day, in occupied Poland.

But I have yet to quote his final thoughts about the scene outside the courtroom. They convey a faith in historical justice that I am unable to share. The view of time as the ultimate and merciless reckoner may be called biblical:

''The old woman's curious curse, 'may grass grow on the walls of your house,' came back to my mind years later, in the summer of 1952, when I visited the ruins of Hitler's villa at Berchtesgaden, blown up by the Americans. The bathroom walls had been faced with expensive tiles, and the grass was now growing luxuriantly between them.''

THE uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto broke out while Nowak was on his first mission to Stockholm. When he returned, the ghetto was a heap of rubble, still smoking here and there. Before his second trip abroad, Nowak visited, in the forests outside Warsaw, the secluded villa of the underground delegate of the Polish Government in London. The conversation that spring afternoon was interrupted when ''ragged and emaciated figures emerged from the forest which came up almost to the front of the house. They were young Jews, saved from the ghetto by a miracle, and now in hiding. The mistress of the house took them a large kettle of soup and an enormous loaf of bread.'' Cut off from the rest of the world, this underground deputy of the Foreign Affairs Minister in London seemed to live in a wonderland, imagining ''that Poland was a power supported by the United States and Britain, which would be able to dictate terms at the peace table not only to the Germans but to the Russians as well.''

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But in that same wonderland, his wife daily fed Jewish boys who had escaped from the ghetto. This vignette contains a tragic and tragicomic truth about those times.

Nowak's next mission took him once again across the Baltic on board a Swedish ship. From Stockholm he was to continue on to London. He was to deliver a top secret report from the Home Army Commander to the Commander in Chief of the Polish Army in the West. At this point in the memoirs the setting changes. The war, shown so far from the bottom of the German occupation, is now seen from the top of the Allies' war machine. The courier from Warsaw met members of the British Cabinet, the Archbishops of Westminster and Canterbury, prominent politicians, influential journalists and generals.Churchill and Eden received him. His interview with Churchill was quite brief. The nervous Nowak was cut short and told to type on a single page what he had to say: '' 'If it is just one page, I promise to read it with attention. If it is longer, my secretary will put it straight into the wastebasket. Agreed?' ''

Eden was astonished to learn that the courier from Warsaw had studied English with a Scotsman who had escaped from a P.O.W. camp in Poland and was supporting himself in occupied Warsaw by teaching English. He laughed and said to Nowak: ''I cannot detect any Scots accent in your English.'' To this day Nowak speaks English with a distinctly Polish accent.

BUT anecdotes aside, the London chapters sketch one of the greatest historical dramas of our time. In London, it became desperately clear to the courier from occupied Warsaw that the Polish cause was doomed, and that after the Allied victory Poland would find itself under Soviet occupation. Even before Yalta, at the Teheran Conference, the division of Germany into two spheres of influence had been decided; for at least the next 50 years the map of postwar Europe was drawn.

In occupied Warsaw in the spring of 1944 I was reading Tolstoy's ''War and Peace'' for the sixth or seventh time. In Tolstoy's philosophy of war, seasons, time and the masses determine victory and defeat; generals imagine that wars are won or lost only by them. The most urgent issue for Poles, especially for the population of Warsaw, was whether - and when - the uprising against the Germans would occur. Nowak was to bring back from London instructions from the Commander in Chief, but the Commander in Chief left the decision to Warsaw. Upon his return, Nowak was summoned to the Home Army headquarters to report on his mission. The meeting took place on Jan. 29. Eight or 10 middle-aged men in civilian clothes sat at a round table in a small room. They had to decide the fate of a city. During the session reports arrived that the Soviet offensive against the Nazis had come to a halt. Under these circumstances an uprising in Warsaw would have been military suicide. Staff officers knew it all too well, but they also knew that the uprising could no longer be prevented. On Aug. 1 the Warsaw uprising started.

During the 63 days of the uprising, Nowak was in charge of the insurgents' radio station, which broadcast in English. Three times the station had to be moved from a bombed building. But the communiques of this feeblest of stations were received in London. They were the first source of information to the West about insurgent Warsaw. After the uprising was crushed, Nowak was sent on his last mission. Crossing Germany, Switzerland and France, he finally reached London. He never returned to Warsaw:

''My fifth and last journey as a courier ended in England ten days before the Yalta Conference. I was the first eyewitness to, and participant in, the Warsaw uprising to reach the West. By that time most of Poland was occupied and the Lublin puppet government had been put in place by the Soviets. The events which I witnessed, and the politicians' reactions to them, led to the division of Europe and, later, to the Cold War.''

WHEN Radio Free Europe was established shortly after the war, Nowak headed the Polish section. Only after retiring in 1976 did he begin to write his war memoirs.

''Courier From Warsaw'' first appeared four years ago in London in Polish; and in 1979 the underground press Nowa published it in Poland. Subsequently the Polish police seized and destroyed the printer's plates. The editor and the printer were arrested and charged, along with other offenses, with printing an illegal book on a state press. Nevertheless, the second edition appeared soon thereafter. Like the first, it sold out immediately. The imposition of martial law in Polandtook place on Dec. 13, 1981, and the history told in ''Courier From Warsaw'' became relevant anew. In Poland copies of Nowak's book are now passed surreptitiously from hand to hand.

I was in Warsaw during the first week after the establishment of martial law. Tanks held the city's strategic spots; military patrols stopped pedestrians for identification; black vans of special police units roamed the streets. Warsaw was again a city under occupation. On my last evening there, as I was returning to my hotel at dusk shortly before the curfew, every few feet I saw scrawled on walls an anchor composed of the letters ''PW.'' ''Polska Walczy'' (Poland Fights) was the emblem of the Home Army that used to appear on the walls of Warsaw during the German occupation. And when, three weeks ago, I received a smuggled copy of the Informator, one of the hundreds of underground bulletins that now appear in Poland, I was not surprised to find on its masthead the trademark: ''Jan Nowak-Jezioranski Field Press.''

Jan Kott, the author of ''Shakespeare Our Contemporary,'' is preparing his memoirs, to be called ''A History of a Generation.''

A version of this review appears in print on October 31, 1982, on Page 7007003 of the National edition with the headline: THE POLISH CONNECTION. Today's Paper|Subscribe